AWL.sh — Web Screenshot API & Social Card Generator

Running your own Puppeteer cluster to capture screenshots means servers to provision, cold starts to manage, and cookie banners polluting every image. AWL runs a real headless Chromium browser on a global edge network — JavaScript renders fully, GDPR consent banners are stripped automatically, and your POST request comes back with a pixel-perfect screenshot or clean extracted content. No infrastructure. No failed-render charges.

How the Screenshot API Works

POST your URL and options — Send a JSON request to the awl.sh screenshot API endpoint with your API key, target URL, and capture settings. Specify the viewport: Mobile (390px), Tablet (768px), Laptop (1366px), Desktop (1920px), or any custom width. Set the output format: PNG, JPEG, WebP, PDF, or Markdown for web content extraction.
Chrome renders at the edge — A headless Chromium browser launches at the global edge location nearest to your target URL and navigates to the page. JavaScript executes fully with networkidle2 wait strategy, ensuring React, Next.js, Vue, and Angular apps render completely. GDPR cookie consent banners and overlay modals are removed automatically before capture.
CDN URL returned instantly — Your screenshot is written to distributed cloud object storage and a CDN-backed delivery URL is returned in the API response. The full render-to-delivery pipeline completes in under three seconds for most pages. Only successful renders are billed — timeouts, blocked requests, and blank pages cost nothing.

Screenshot API Features

Visual SERP & AI Overview Monitoring — Capture Google AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and local pack entries exactly as Chrome renders them. No caching, no approximations — what a real user actually sees.
Precision Cookie-Banner Removal — Two-pass cleanup: 30+ named CMPs (OneTrust, CookieBot, Quantcast, Didomi) removed by selector, then a DOM-wide scan removes any remaining fixed or sticky overlay regardless of CSS class name.
Social Card & OG Image API — The 1200×630 social card viewport preset generates Open Graph images, Twitter Card thumbnails, and LinkedIn preview images from any URL in a single POST request. No HTML template server, no S3 bucket, no CDN config.
Full SPA & JavaScript Rendering — networkidle2 wait strategy — no network activity for 500ms — ensures React dashboards, Vue storefronts, and Angular apps hydrate completely before the screenshot is taken.
Full-Page Scroll Capture — Auto-scrolls up to 8,000px in 800px increments to trigger lazy-loaded images and infinite-scroll content before snapping the full-page screenshot.
Multi-Viewport Screenshot API — Mobile, Tablet, Laptop, Desktop, and custom viewport widths from 320px to 3,840px.
Web Content Extraction API — Convert any page to clean Markdown, plain text, or full rendered HTML. Use CSS selectors or XPath to pull structured data from specific elements.
Pay-Per-Success Pricing — Only successful renders are billed. Bot detection blocks, timeouts, and empty-body responses are free. For high-failure-rate workloads like SERP monitoring, this changes the economics significantly.

Screenshot API Output Formats

PNG — Lossless, no compression artifacts. The right call for visual regression pipelines and screenshot diff tooling where pixel accuracy matters.
JPEG — Lossy compression at configurable quality. Cuts file size 60–80% versus PNG for social card delivery and og:image generation.
WebP — Smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality, supported by every modern browser. The practical default for screenshots served directly to end users.
PDF — Full-page PDF export with background graphics and web fonts. Use for compliance archiving and generating printable reports from live web dashboards.
Markdown — DOM-traversal content extraction: navigation, ads, and sidebars stripped, article content converted to clean Markdown. Standard input format for LLM pipelines and RAG document stores.
HTML — The fully-rendered DOM after JavaScript execution. Captures React component output and lazy-loaded elements exactly as a real browser would see them.

Screenshot API Use Cases

SERP & AI Overview Tracking — Build a scheduled screenshot pipeline that captures target keyword search result pages daily, stores timestamped snapshots in distributed cloud object storage, and flags changes in AI Overview content.
Automated og:image Generation — Replace a Puppeteer-based HTML template server with a single API call. Pass the canonical URL of a content page and receive a CDN URL for a 1200×630 Open Graph thumbnail.
Competitor & Change Monitoring — Capture the web as it existed at a precise moment — not the CDN-cached version, but what a real browser would have seen. Feed pixel diffs into alerting pipelines or compliance audit trails.
Link Preview & Thumbnail APIs — One GET request returns a CDN-hosted image URL ready to embed in any product. No Puppeteer cluster, no cold starts, no infrastructure to maintain.

Get started free — no credit card required. Try the free website screenshot tool or read the screenshot API documentation. Contact us at awl.sh/contact.